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Comment by phkamp | Hacker News Reader

With unencrypted HTTP, NSA can just grab the packets on the fiber and search for any keyword they want.

With a self-signed cert they would have to do a Man In The Middle attack on you to see your traffic.

They don't have the capacity (or ability! man of their fibertaps are passive) to do that to all the traffic at all the time.

The problem with making a CA-blessed cert a requirement for all or even most of the traffic, is that it forces the NSA to break SSL/TLS or CAs definitively, otherwise they cannot do their job.

Fundamentally this is a political problem, just slapping encryption on traffic will not solve it.

But it can shift the economy of the situation -- but you should think carefully what way you shift it.

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> The problem with making a CA-blessed cert a requirement for all or even most of the traffic, is that it forces the NSA to break SSL/TLS or CAs definitively, otherwise they cannot do their job.

Isn't the whole point of pervasive authenticated encryption to prevent the NSA from "doing their job" (at least the spying part of it)?

> But it can shift the economy of the situation -- but you should think carefully what way you shift it.

It shifts more than the economy of the situation. It also forces a shift from passive attacks to active attacks, which are easier to detect and harder to justify. Forcing the attacker to justify their acts has a political effect.

> Forcing the attacker to justify their acts has a political effect.

Which essentially means that terrorists and pedophiles are gonna be using encryption to harm the kids and browsers will have to obey to a new wonderful kids-protecting law and add a backdoor.

Pervasive authenticated encryption will not prevent the NSA from doing their job, as long as lawmakers think they should do their job.

Instead you will see key-escrow laws or even bans on encryption.

You cannot solve the political problem by applying encryption.

Laws against encryption will never be international. In the US it happened before [1], so there is indeed precedent. But such laws prevent a country from being competitive in the international marketplace, therefore many countries will not agree to it, just as they aren't agreeing with IP laws. And yes, I also believe that this trend on having national firewalls for censoring content will also not last for long, for the same reason.

What I love about technology is that it cannot be stopped with lawmaking.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_the...

The historical evidence that technology cannot be stopped by lawmakers is very weak, if it even exists in the first place.

Very few lawmakers have really tried, and few technologies have been worth it in the first place.

The relevant question is probably if technology can be delayed by lawmaking and how long time.

There is no doubt however that policies can be changed, most places it just takes elections but a few places may need a revolution.

Thinking this is a problem you can solve by rolling out SSL or TLS is incredibly naive.

> Instead you will see key-escrow laws or even bans on encryption.

That's a defeatist attitude: "we can't win, so let's not even try".

It's not guaranteed that pervasive authenticated encryption will lead to key-escrow laws or bans on encryption. In fact, the more common authenticated encryption is, the harder is to pass laws against it.

As an example, consider how common encrypted wireless networks are nowadays. A blanket ban on encryption would be opposed by many of the wireless network owners. And that's only one use of encryption.

Key escrow has the extra problem of being both costly and very complex to implement correctly.

No, I'm not saying "lets not even try", I'm saying "Lets try with the right tools for the job: Voting ballots."

In the meantime we should not cripple our protocols, hoping that the NSA will go "aahh shucks!" and close shop, when the law clearly tells them to "Collect everything."

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